Sales representatives who call upon retail businesses to sell the goods of the manufacturers that they represent to such businesses typically have to bring printed materials and/or samples with them when they make a sales call to enable the retail businesses to pick the products desired. If the representative represents several manufacturers, or even one manufacturer who has hundreds or thousands of products, the task of providing the potential customer with those materials so that a selection of the desired product(s) can be made becomes very difficult and unwieldy.
A need thus exists for an automated system which can eliminate the need for sales representative to carry printed materials showing their various represented products to potential customers for order taking.
The subject invention addresses that need. To that end, the subject invention constitutes a wholesale product ordering system including at least one server on which is stored a database of information about numerous products and manufacturers. Each representative can have stored on that server information about each of the products of each of the manufacturers that he/she represents. To access the data of that database each representative carries a remote access device, e.g., an Apple® iPad, Windows® netbook, Android tablet, or any other hand-held device including a video screen so that he/she can download the entire application, along with the database, wirelessly via the Internet. Thus, once the application is on the remote access device when the representative visits a potential customer he/she can show the customer the various products available on the screen of the remote access device. Orders can then be taken and input into the system, via the keypad.